GA 327 | Continuous Improvement and Humanitarianism with Andrew Parris

The response was so overwhelmingly positive. From those first few experiences, people were like, Andrew, you have to come and teach us this. This is what we need. We are having trouble with our processes. Things take too long. So from the people on the ground, they understood the challenges that they were having. We need to be more efficient. This is something we really need help with.

Today. I'm excited to welcome Andrew Paris to the show. Now, Andrew has a really, really interesting background. He was educated in America and quite the education in PhD from MIT. And then he went on to work in several really interesting organizations such as Lockheed Martin. But then as you'll hear, he read a book called Walking with the Poor. And this really seemed to change his life and launched him into a completely different career. And that is to work with some NGOs, which Andrew will explain exactly what an NGO is. But in essence, the organization that Andrew works for now, and even the previous one that he worked with before this current one, is really to help people in different parts of the world who might be struggling with violence or earthquakes and things like that. So some of these countries include like Somalia and South Sudan and Iraq and some other places. And so their organization is going in. But what Andrew's doing is he's actually using his background in his education and, and Lean and Six Sigma, and he's been formally trained as green belt, black belt, master black belt, all that kind of stuff. And he's leveraging those skills to make the work that medair and even his previous organization are doing and just showing how Lean and Six Sigma truly know no boundary. And so very, very inspiring show. Please listen to the whole thing. It's a little bit longer than normal, but I think you're going to really enjoy Andrew's story. We're going to link to some articles that Andrew's written and then to all of Andrew's social media connections. And that's gonna be over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 327. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 327. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Andrew, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Well, thanks, Ron. It's a pleasure and an honor to have this time with you and your audience. Thank you.

Well, thank you for coming on. So where are you calling in from, Andrew?

Thank you. Calling in from near Lausanne in Switzerland, on Lake Geneva.

Wow, that's a beautiful part of the world. It is, yeah. Must be not hard to wake up every morning to that, I guess, right?

No, it's not a bad place to be stuck when the coronavirus is around, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Well, yeah, and we're recording this on May 11, so we're actually as people are looking at their watch, like, wait, what? You know, this probably won't come out here for at least a month and a half or so from now, but we're a little bit ahead. But that's okay. Maybe I always wonder, is that overproduction? You know, but no, because we're going to use it. We're definitely going to use it. So we're just a little ahead right now. But thank you for coming on and willing to share your story. Andrew and I know, you know, we listened to the show a little bit and as you know, we like to begin with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to share?

Yep. Yeah, I do. So my favorite quote on Lean comes actually from the Hebrew Scriptures, or what Christians call the Old Testament. It's a passage written around 700 BC from the Prophet Micah. And he asks with some very graphic examples, what do you want from me, God? And then he answers the question in what is a very well known passage from the Bible? But I'll read the whole thing to you with the context and then explain it a bit afterwards. So he asks with what? Shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body, for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love, kindness and to walk humbly with your God? So from a Lean perspective, I like this because it actually has the idea of customer and customer value and asking your customer what's important to you? What do you want? And God gives a very succinct, precise answer on that. So that's an old idea of customer value. The other thing is, from a lean perspective, I also see the idea of not fixing defects, because what it is is God saying, I don't want sacrifices for the wrong things that you've done. I want you to live a good life. So quality at the source. Live a good life, act justly, love, kindness, and walk humbly with him.

Nice. When was that again? When was that written?

700 B.C.

Yeah, it's a little bit before the machine. It changed the world, right Quite a few years.

Yes, quite a few years.

The original Lean Thinker, right? Maybe, yeah. Very good, very good. All Andrew, again, thanks for coming on. I want you to. We'll do the opening a little bit different here today. I want you to definitely tell us a little bit about yourself, your personal story. But then before we kind of jump into the whole topic of the day, I want you to tell us a little bit about your organization as well. But let's start with you. Tell us about your background, tell us about how you first got introduced to all this continuous improvement stuff and then maybe that leads us then into medair and what medair's. Is that how you say it? Medaire?

Medair's. Right, yes.

And tell us about your mission and what you guys are up to.

Yep, yep, sure. Great. We're glad to. So I've always kind of liked to improve things and I went as an undergraduate to University of California at Berkeley in manufacturing engineering. I wanted to do engineering but also wanted to have something hands on, practical. So that's where the manufacturing part came in. Interestingly, at that time, it was in 1984, which is just the same year that NUME got started. So we kind of heard about that, didn't maybe understand the full significance of it, but was there at that time, worked for two years afterwards as a manufacturing engineer for 3Com in Silicon Valley. Then I took off for graduate school. So I went to MIT and was part of the Lean Aircraft Initiative. So I got my master's and PhD there in mechanical engineering. And the Lean Aircraft Initiative was a follow on project from the International Motor Vehicle Program out of which the book the Machine that Changes the World came. So in fact it was the US Air Force saying, hey, we see this Lean thing, we see it makes sense for cars, does it make sense for airplanes as well? So it's kind of fascinating to go back to that early stage of when Lean was just introduced and there really was a sincere question, does this apply to anything more than cars? And the first question that we were faced with there was, does it apply to aircraft? Because aircraft were getting more expensive and defects and delays and stuff like that. And they wanted to know if it does apply, does it apply? If so, and how. And the answer came back, yes, it definitely does apply. And here's how. After that I joined Lockheed Martin on the Atlas rocket program, mostly for about 11 years, was part of Lockheed Martin's LM21 program.

Where were you located with Lockheed?

Yeah. So there I was in the space systems company based in Denver. Colorado.

Okay.

And was part of helping develop, training, giving training. I got my black belt training there and then also got lean six master black belt training, but trained a large number of green belts. We had a two day leadership training that I helped develop and give to a large number of people. And I was basically a process improvement facilitator during my time there with Atlas Rocket in the Colorado area. So along the way I took an online course in economic development and I read a book called Walking with the Poor as part of that course. And that's the book that got me inspired and interested to get into the NGO world. So Walking with the Poor is a book written by Bryant Myers, one of the former senior leaders of World Vision International. And he was explaining World Vision's approach to what he calls transformational development. So when World Vision goes into community, how do they engage with the community to help them out of poverty? And this is what they call it, transformational development. But when I read it, I saw that, wow, this is actually quite similar to what I'm doing as a process improvement facilitator. In fact, the person World Vision person in the field is called a development facilitator. So we were both facilitating improvement of some sort. And when I saw the similarities, wow, you know, I'm interested in this organization. I'd like to work for them. And it took about a year or so, but I was able to find a position in World Vision. And I worked there for nine years, mostly for three years, first in Los Angeles, then for three years in East Africa and then back for three years in Los Angeles. And World Vision is one of the largest NGOs in the world. They do development and humanitarian work, developing more, working with communities on an ongoing basis, humanitarian often being more response to particular crisis. And that was kind of the. My time in East Africa was, I would say, my highlight there. I was able to strictly focus on continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma and got some amazing results with the people that I trained as green belts who then took on projects in their areas. So I trained over 450 people with training. I developed a one day process excellence Energizer, training 56 green belts and then also organized training for 12 black belts who were leaders in their country for continuous improvement. So that was World Vision and after World Vision, about little over three and a half, about three and a half years ago now I joined medair, which is a Swiss humanitarian ngo, which means we are focused on responding to crises and some of the crises are rapid onset and brand new crises like earthquakes Hurricanes and those types of things. Other crises unfortunately are much more ongoing. So most work, in fact that we do are in countries where there's ongoing crises largely due to conflict. So Medair is about 1800 or so people in employees. We have another almost 8000 people as volunteers, mostly in the field where we work. As I mentioned, we are based, headquartered here in Switzerland, but we work in about a dozen different countries. So Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Somalia, Dr. Congo, South Sudan, Madagascar and Bangladesh are the countries that we're in right now. So think about the trouble spots in the world.

I was going to say, boy, interesting lineup there.

Yeah, we are there. And I think maybe talk about later. It does pose some challenges to doing continuous improvement. But yeah, so that's medr. It's an amazing group of people. They are committed to helping people in crisis, to giving all that they. People really do put a lot of energy and time into the work because the mission is so important. About 300 or so of the employees are international staff, but most of our staff are actually nationally recruited people who live in the countries where we are serving and they're helping their own fellow country people or also a lot of volunteers that we work with are from the refugees or internally displaced people. So they're helping their own communities to, to survive and to help them get out of some of these crises that they're in.

So, Andrew, I've been trying to figure this out, if you don't mind. Like what's your, where were you born? What's your heritage?

Where was I born? Interesting question. Yeah, I was born in Hollywood actually.

Okay.

I grew up in Santa Monica in Southern California, I was going to say.

Because if you're European, you have the most amazing non European accent that I've ever heard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a California accent. We don't have accents in California actually, as far as I get it. But the funny thing is I do have. My mother is Swiss and part of probably where my Lean story begins is with my Swiss mother who's so organized and efficient in things. I think it's something that maybe comes a bit more naturally to Swiss people. The part about being structured and organized about things.

And our watches, right? Really good watches.

And the watches. Yes, yes. The mechanical ones at least.

Yeah, yeah, very cool. Okay, awesome. Hey, before we jump in deeper into whole Lean and NGO and all that topic, this level set, everyone listening to what it is, an ngo, just kind of start there just so everybody has a, has a foundation.

Yep, yep. Great, great question. So NGO stands for Non governmental organization. And it's bas, a nonprofit that is working to help communities and is typically across borders. So if we're in the US we would talk about local nonprofits who are helping people in our community or maybe nationwide. But when it's a nonprofit that's helping in a typically developing country or in a crisis context, we often call this non governmental organizations as opposed to the United nations, which are intergovernmental organizations.

Got it, got it. Okay. So, you know, last few episodes we've had some interesting folks on. We have some folks in the legal profession and just some areas that you don't typically see Lean and Six Sigma being applied. And I think NGO fits right in that, in that category as well. Is probably not your traditional place to find continuous improvement being applied. So let's just kind of start there, like talk a little bit about maybe some of the, the challenges, some of the differences, some of the even, maybe some of the similarities just of NGO and how continuous improvement is being applied.

Yep, yep. Great. So maybe we start with the key differences. So obviously the first one that jumps out is mission oriented versus profit oriented. You know, we don't make a profit. We're not allowed to make a profit. Our goal is the mission that we have. Obviously good companies also have a mission, and mission is more important than profit. But they also have shareholders that they need to satisfy and we don't. So mission is probably number one for an NGO that's working in a crisis or developmental context. One of the things you'll find is low technology, poor infrastructure, the roads, the electricity, the Internet connectivity are all challenges of an ngo. The specifically humanitarian work that we do is by its nature very unpredictable. So there's high volatility, lots of changes, lots of unpredictable things that are going on. The need is huge compared to the resources that there are. So there's always. The humanitarian work is about 50% funded globally. So there's just always more that one can do. High turnover rate also, especially in the field, it's relatively stressful work. So people are turning over quite quickly. We have contracts for our expats at least of one to two years and they may come and take another job somewhere else in medair, but it is still a high turnover rate that we have to deal with. Obviously our value, value adding processes are different. We're helping save lives, so we're distributing. What do we. Well, that's a good point. Maybe what are we distributing? Medair focuses in three primary areas, the first of which is health and nutrition. So we support or Run medical clinics. Then on the nutrition side, that would have to do with malnourished. So primarily mothers and children under five who are malnourished, we have feeding programs for them. We also do wash, which is water, sanitation and hygiene. So in addition to water supplies such as wells, boreholes, water catchment areas, we also help with digging latrines and ways of getting rid of human waste. And part of that is also messaging. So we are helping people. You know, even if you get a pot of clean water, you should keep it covered and you should wash your hands, etc. Around that so that it doesn't get contaminated by the time you actually use it. Which is actually a big part of what we're doing, and we'll expect to be doing for many months to come now is with coronavirus, we're actually changing a lot of our programming to promote the messaging that's needed for people to stay safe and not catch the coronavirus. And then also on our medical side, we're looking at how to isolate people and then how to support the medical clinics that we are the runner support with personal protective equipment and other things that they need to, to treat people and to care for people who get the disease. And then the third thing that we do is what we call shelter, shelter and infrastructure. So that's tents can be houses, could be bridges. We just finished a bridge in the Dr. Conga recently as suspension bridge over a small river so people could have access to clinics and markets and stuff like that. We also do as part of our medical health and nutrition. We would do psychosocial support because a lot of people are suffering from not only having seen and experienced terrible things in conflict, but also just the challenge of being a refugee or an internally displaced person. For years, I think I heard this statistic recently. The average time that people spend in refugee camps is 17 years. You think it's the short thing. People live and grow up in refugee camps. We think we're struggling if we're inside of our houses for a month or a couple months. But the challenge for refugees and internally displaced people is huge. So, yeah, maybe, hopefully that also helps. Maybe it's out of order, but hopefully it gives you a better sense of what an NGO does to fill in that question. So that's our value. Add additional challenges that we have security and insecurity. Often there's violence, so it's hard for us to get access to some places. And we have to be very careful to make sure that our people are safe and they come home safely. Another difference is that we have two customers, we have the beneficiary, the people that we're helping, and we have donors who give us money. So typically when someone buys a car from Toyota, they just are happy to have a car, but. But they pay for it and they get the car for us. We have a donor who gives us money. They don't actually see the end result. So we have a lot of reporting, a lot of requirements that they impose on us to make sure that their money is being spent as well as it possibly could.

If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious, from a donor's perspective, can you give us an idea of what are they looking for? And I'm sure it varies depending on the donor. But just if you could give maybe an example or two of what are some of the things that they're hoping to see.

Well, so we put very specific proposals together for donors. Exactly what will we do with their money? And I'm talking here about institutional donors. So governments like US Government, USAID is one, I think our largest donor through ofta, the British have their donation to a humanitarian work branch. The European Union has echo. And so these are large governmental donors who you have to give a very specific proposal. So we will build this many latrines, we will give this many vaccines, we will see this many patients and very specific build this many medical clinics, build this many latrines. So very specific, a year or two in advance. Here's what we plan to do with your money. So they're actually wanting to see ultimately that people are helped, but we have to report to them how we spent the money, the things that we do. And they want to see that the latrines have been built, medical clinics have been built, that we've seen the beneficiaries and that their money has been actually spent. So donors are actually requiring us to show traceability from procurement all the way to distribution to individual people that they know that X number of these things haven't been diverted somewhere and somebody's sold them and made money on the side.

So one of the most common things that we all lean in Six Sigma practitioners here, I think no matter where you work or what you do, is that if you aren't building cars in an assembly line, everyone assumes that they're different. Not as if I always joke, oh yeah, because making a car every 60 seconds is easy, goodness gracious. But I'm sure you are faced with that within your world. That lean Six Sigma continuous improvement in general just aren't a normal part of what an NGO is typically all about. Are you hearing that? And if so, how are you responding to that?

On the one hand, coming back to the donors, they are actually interested in value for money. They are interested in NGO that runs effectively and efficiently. There's not a measured way to report that, but there is interest in the donors, in us becoming more effective and efficient. But to answer your question, a couple different ways. So when I first went to Africa, while I was working for World Vision, before I moved there, I was actually collecting some data and I said, here I am to myself. Here I am with this background from MIT and this expertise and processes and Lean and Six Sigma. I would feel really bad if I just went there and took information but didn't leave anything of value in return. So I said, you know, I've got this thing called Process Excellence and would you be interested for me to give you a brief training on this? So I did that in a couple places, Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda. And the response was so overwhelmingly positive. From those first few experiences, people were like, Andrew, you have to come and teach us this. This is what we need. We are having trouble with our process. Things take too. They didn't use the word processes, but in our work, things take too long. So from the people on the ground, they understood I was able to connect with them. They understood the challenges that they were having. We need to be more efficient. This is something we really need help with. The second point was one that I mentioned earlier, which was the similarity between Lean and what World Vision calls transformational development. But what any good NGO does, which is an NGO doesn't come in to a community and tell people what to do. They don't come in and say, okay, do this, do this. We're giving money here, we're going to fund this, we're going to build this, do that for you. That's horrible development. It used to be maybe the way things happened many years ago, but nowadays all NGOs are on board with. As an NGO, we are facilitating the development with a community. The people in the community are the experts in what it is to live in the community. They have the ideas, they have the dreams that they want to achieve. They have. They know how to get things done. They know what works, what doesn't work, they know what the problems are. If you want to do root cause problem solving, you have to involve them. You can't come in as an outsider and say, this is your problem, do this, do that, the other, because then you don't have ownership either. So maintaining Ownership of the people in the community, getting people to participate. So the person who comes in, whether it's process improvement facilitator in Lean, or it's a community development facilitator in transformation development, they're the experts in improvement. They're the experts with the processes, the tools. Their job is to come in and build the capacity of people, to inspire them, to motivate them, to coach them, to help them work through, as the book is called, Walking with the Poor. You walk with people in their journey out of poverty. So. So the thing that really helped me in the NGO context was to say, look, this in fact is very similar to what you're already doing. It's not something fundamentally different. It's fundamentally the same type of thing. So I used to say, I'm just doing in World Vision or in Medair, what you're already doing in communities. But we need. The fact is we also need to do this to ourselves, and what better place? So that that connection was really very valuable. And so what I did was I created something called Process Excellence, rather than using the terms Lean or Six Sigma. And I came up with five elements. They're effective, efficient, appropriate, empowering, and continuously improving. And those five elements described in some more detail, really connect with the lean Six Sigma thinking and the principles of humanitarian and development work in a way that people said, yeah, this makes sense to us, this is valuable to us. Let's do this. So I think the resistance is probably more. The people don't understand. They're not aware that there is this thing called Lean that can help them in their organizational, improving the organization they want to improve. They are committed to providing as much help as they can. But the concepts and the terminology and the tools from Lean just haven't gotten into the NGO world.

Yeah, I got it. So listen, I definitely want to get to the whole idea of some of the places that you're going into, as far as some of the places that might be dangerous due to violence and whatnot. But before I ask that, I wanted you to. Can you give us maybe an example of an improvement that you've seen, a green belt or a black belt or whoever it might be that you've trained, just give us an example or two of some improvements that they've realized as a result of learning how to think this way?

Yeah, yeah. So in order to get started in the NGO context, it's made the most sense actually to start where NGOs are most similar to normal companies, which is human resources, finance, procurement. And IT as well, NGOs develop some IT systems require IT support. So what we did in, in World Vision in East Africa and what I've been focusing on here in medair are the support processes, because that's where the time is most direct and easiest. So we conducted a number of projects on the recruitment process. How do we recruit people, how long does it take? What are the steps? And we were able to, typically when we measured it, and it was something we were intending to improve, we were able to reduce the number, the span, time, basically for recruitment and other processes by about 60%. So how long, quickly does it take us? How long does it take us to hire someone? How quickly can we pay? How quickly can we procure things? We were able to really reduce those significantly. Just to give you one example of one country, the country director needed to sign off on every new hire. Before we came in and looked at the process, that was not the only improvement we made, but a number of improvements. And afterwards she said, andrew, thank you so much. I wasn't really looking at them and I didn't really want to do them, but they all had to come through my desk. And this is a country of over a thousand employees, so you can imagine every week, couple of signatures are coming. And there's a lot of examples of things like that where, gosh, it made sense at one point in time, maybe when the NGO was smaller or something happened and we added a control in, but it just doesn't make sense nowadays.

Do you ever have an opportunity to do any type of. And I think you sort of mentioned this earlier, but some training with some folks in the places in the world that you're trying to help, you know what I mean?

So, no. So the training that I've been doing has been for my colleagues, for fellow employees, rather than for the beneficiaries who were serving.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

I love to do that also. Yeah.

Well, I'm just curious, maybe one day down the road that's, you know, it's kind of like the whole idea of teaching people to fish, right? And, you know, teaching them how to. How to improve their lives, you know, assuming they have the resources to do it. Right, so.

Well, yeah, yeah. And the thing is, they do, because many of them are, you know, running small businesses or farms or whatever.

Right, yeah, yeah.

So, in fact, you remind me, in Tanzania, one of the medair employees, also on the side with his family, ran a business. They were making oil out of pressing some seeds, I think it was, or something like that. And they had had some quality Problems. And even before I was going to give the training, when the training happened, he said he pulled me aside one time over lunch. He said, andrew, I need to tell you ahead of time, I read your materials and I started applying these lean Six Sigma concepts in my family business. And we reduced, I can't remember, but it's something like doubling their productivity and reducing their defects in half. So I haven't had the opportunity to do that. I've at one point applied for a innovation grant, which didn't work out. But to do this, because I think every dollar or whatever the local currency is that people lose because of poor quality, whether it's a carpenter or farmer or whoever is trying to earn money and eke out a living, everything that they can save in terms of waste turns into a meal or ability for their children to go to school and things like that. So I have seen some examples that others have done. I think it's. It would be a wonderful thing to pursue. Haven't had the chance to do it yet.

Got it. So, to wrap things up, Andrew, I want you to maybe tell us a little bit about, you know, you mentioned earlier about some of these countries that you're going into. You mentioned Somalia, you mentioned, you know, Iraq, South Sudan, a couple other places. Talk about, about what it's like going into these places and some of the, you know, some of the, some of the things that you guys are doing to stay safe.

Yeah. So one of our core, I would say one of medair especially, but World vision also one of our core processes in humanitarian work is our security. We have super security teams. We have very tight. If we have anywhere, we have really good procedures, it's in security. In South Sudan, for example, if there's a team. So we have a rapid response team in South Sudan, we have global response team for major earthquakes and things like that. But in South Sudan, we have rapid response teams. And when they're on the road, they call in every morning at a particular time, every noon at particular time, every late afternoon, particular time. They are aware of what's going on around them. If there's any questions about security, they're in coordination with other NGOs, other local players, with the communities. So they're really on top of the security situation. So when I go to these countries, I've been in Iraq, I've been to South Sudan, I've been in Somalia, but only close to the airport in Somalia, I actually feel quite safe because I know that our security processes are top notch and we have good people working on this. So I can actually feel relaxed.

I'm wondering. And I'm sure every place is different and humans are all different. There's incredible variability within each human being. But I'm wondering, you know, I've got friends in the kind of religious communities in, like, New York City. And some of these folks, you know, they'll wear, you know, they're Catholic priests or whatever. Some of these guys, these Franciscans, you know, they walk around with their, you know, you can tell who they are and they'll tell stories of. They'll walk through extremely violent areas. And there's people who are, I would say violent, who leave them alone. Right. They almost respect the office. Not that they are Catholic or religious or Christian or anything like that. But I'm wondering, is there any of that people know who you are, and so even if they are, if they tend towards violence, they may not be violent. Does that make sense?

So for the most part, it's true. However, there are, should we say, some problem players who are targeting humanitarian workers also because they just don't want them in their country. So we really do have to be careful of kidnapping and other attacks on our people. That is a real threat to us. But there was a situation in World Vision where a community surrounded a World Vision compound and they were being attacked by an armed group. And the community said, we won't let you do this. These people are helping us. They're here for us. You have to go away. We want these people to stay. And they were able to protect the World Vision compound through themselves. And that's really. The secret is. Secret is not the right word. The crucial ingredient is to have good relationships with the communities. And it's something we really take a great effort to do, is to promote good relationships, answering questions, spending time with the communities, the leaders of the community, community members. We have mechanisms for them to give complaints and tell us if there's problems. And we take those all very seriously. But no, we're. Community relationships are very important to the work that we do.

Yeah. Before we wrap up, I know you've written some articles, Andrew, that have been really good. I've read through them before we. Before we started the recording. And I know there's some. Some other references that you're. That you'd like to point people towards. I'm wondering if you just give us just a one or two minute highlight of these articles and some of these references and we'll for sure link them in our show notes for this episode.

Yep. Yeah. Great, thanks. So the article One article that I wrote is Improving Processes for Good in East Africa, a bit of a pun there. And it basically describes the experience in East Africa, the challenges of doing lean Six Sigma and in the NGO development context, what we did, the successes we had, the challenges that we had and some of the results that we achieved. And then more recently with the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, I wrote an article called Making Work and the World a Better Place outlining some of these similarities that we talked about between lean and Transformational Development and even with the core humanitarian standards, some of the principles that we work with in the humanitarian world. So that's another one accessible. I can also make available to you my process excellence description because I think that really integrates well all the lean Six Sigma corporate world principles on the one hand and on the other hand the principles of humanitarian and development world because in fact they're really applicable to everyone. So the effective and efficient, what you get emphasized in the corporate world really is helpful to NGOs and the appropriate and empowering that come kind of are these things which are really quite strong in the development and humanitarian world are in fact also extremely important in the corporate world. So they really kind of fit together well then of course continuously improving over all that. So I'd be glad to have a one page description of that which I think would be great, would be helpful. Great.

And this is going to be, let's see episode 327 so people can go to GembaPodcast.com, look for episode 327 and we'll look at link to everything Andrew's been describing. So if folks want to connect with you, Andrew, what's the best way?

Yeah, so like the others, LinkedIn is.

A great way to spell your last name, Andrew.

Yeah. So it's like the city in France but with two Rs P A R R I S. Be delighted to connect with anyone or by email. Also Andrew Parris.org the Medair website is Medaire.org to find out more information about Medaire and what we do.

And Medair is M E D A.

I R A I R. Yes. We don't do just medical and we don't do only flying, but it has to do with a bit of our history. But yeah, Medair m e-air.org got it.

Got it. Wow. Thank you for sharing your story, Andrew. And thank you for all you and your colleagues and your past colleagues just are doing to. To make the world a better place. You know, as you were, you were finishing up there I just kept the things that were running through my mind about, you know, you're talking about the similarities between what you guys are doing and what, you know, any organization's trying to do. In the end, I think we can sum it up with a couple things. Improve processes and help people. Right? I mean, if you can do those two things, you improve processes and help people, golly, there's, it's, it's, it's, it's. There's no limit to what we can do. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So beautiful. Well, thank you again. Hopefully let's connect maybe, I don't know, another 50 episodes or so and hear some more of the stories that you guys are working on. I think it would be really, really fun to connect again.

Andrew, be glad to. Thank you very much for the opportunity to share this time.

Okay. All right, you take care and enjoy the beautiful weather and everything out there and where you're at now.

Thank you. Thank you. All right. All the best to you too.

Take of care. Take care, Andrew.

Bye. Bye. Yep, goodbye.

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